An ocean goddess will soon rise inside NOMA, pointing out the water’s oil spill-related decline as well as the sometime graffiti artist’s rise to stardom

Michael DeMocker / The Times-PicayuneCaledonia Curry, better known as Swoon, will install her new linoleum-block print Thalassa in the atrium of the New Orleans Museum of Art

A giant paper ocean goddess will soon dominate the atrium of the New Orleans Museum of Art. Her beseeching face will point upward toward the ceiling, as if she were rising from the depths toward the surface of the sea. Long paper ribbons will cascade beneath her like tentacles, stretching downward all the way to the white columns that support the mezzanine. It will be a splendid display by one of the world’s most famous artists — if all goes as planned, that is.

Brooklyn-based Caledonia Curry, better known by her pseudonym Swoon, says that art-world acclaim is awesome, but it can also be stressful. While the gap between conceiving a grand-scale artistic idea and having all the funding, facilities and helpers she needs to make it a reality has never been narrower, having to juggle the constant art-producing pressure can be taxing.

It was in late summer 2010 that NOMA curator Miranda Lash invited Curry to use the museum as the site for a future artwork, giving her an impromptu after-hours tour of the atrium roof. Curry eagerly accepted.

But now it’s June 2011, just eight days before the opening reception, and Curry’s running a little behind schedule. Thalassa — that’s the name of the goddess — is 13 feet tall, and that’s just her torso. She’s the largest linoleum-block print Curry has ever made. So large, in fact, that Curry had to bend the huge sheet of linoleum to fit it inside her New York studio, where she hand-carved the image, a process that took days longer than she predicted. The Thalassa print is pasted to a stiff plywood cutout that will be suspended by chain from the NOMA ceiling.

In a nondescript Crescent City warehouse, Curry demonstrated the sort of sliding dance move she used as she pressed huge sheets of paper onto the inked linoleum with her feet to produce Thalassa. She learned the foot-as-printing-press technique by accidentally stepping on prints during the inking process in her cluttered studio, she said. Big paper prints are Swoon’s stock and trade, but they’re not the sort of tame art reproductions so often found framed on apartment walls. Swoon, 33, gained international fame as a graffiti guerrilla, aggressively applying her artwork to public places with — or without — the property owner’s permission.

Michael DeMocker / The Times-PicayuneThalassa, a large-scale sculpture by street artist Swoon, rises in a New Orleans warehouse

But Swoon’s style has always been a bit gentler than most taggers. Curry’s lacy paper prints, often perforated with hundreds of shaped holes and affixed to public walls with old-fashioned wheat paste, aren’t permanent like spray paint. In time, they peel away. And the images she chooses to decorate urban common areas — mostly portraits of benign deities and ordinary folk — don’t have the same alienated bravado of most graffiti writers.

When she takes her prints and paste to the streets, she is guided, she says, by a certain self-styled ethical code. For instance, she avoids applying prints to “fully functioning” houses. Instead, she seeks out abandoned properties or walls that seem destined for public displays. The thing that has kept her out of trouble with the law, she says, is that “I’m nice about it.”

It’s a bit odd, of course, to be discussing the legal risks of renegade street art with a well-publicized art star who’s in the middle of a major museum commission, working in the pristine, brightly lit, air-conditioned interior of a museum storage facility. The same sort of prints as those scattered everywhere on the white warehouse floor can cost tens of thousands of dollars in art galleries — sometimes more. Swoon says she’s aware of the irony but is a bit more comfortable with her dual establishment/anti-establishment roles than in the past.

“It’s not as prickly any more,” she said, now that she realizes her career needn’t be an either-or choice.

In addition to her street-style prints, Swoon has gained acclaim for creating elaborate sculptural vessels made from junk, one of which she and friends famously floated through the canals of Venice, as an uninvited interloper in that city’s 2009 international art exhibition. And she and a Crescent City art organization known as New Orleans Airlift plan to create a sculptural house rigged with music-making devices in the Bywater.

In a dourer vein, Swoon has traveled twice to earthquake-torn Haiti to help construct a functional home and a community center.

As she prepared for her second trip, the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill began. Curry’s sense of ecological dread was especially acute because she grew up in Daytona Beach, Fla., where the ocean is a part of daily life. Like so many artists, she said she felt compelled to express her angst in the best way she knew how: creatively. Symbolically speaking, the spirit of the sea was suffering, and that was the inspiration behind Thalassa.

The goddess’ sternum is composed of a horseshoe crab plastron, her rib cage is framed with writhing pipefish, and her hair is tangled with seaweed. Scattered on the floor around Swoon were prints of fish skeletons and other amorphous oceanic shapes waiting to be pasted together into watery ribbons.

Though one’s first impression is of the life-affirming elegance of Curry’s unfinished sea goddess, she says that in the end, viewers will discern the deleterious effects of oil. But, she said, she’d like us to interpret the piece as a poetic personal reaction to the tragedy, not simply as an oil company protest.

She hopes Thalassa speaks “the language of connecting to nature.”

Artist Swoon discusses Thalassa sculpture at New Orleans Museum of ArtCaledonia "Swoon" Curry discusses her new print/sculpture installation "Thalassa" at the New Orleans Museum of Art, which she describes as a "beautiful, grotesque octopus jellyfish woman." As she speaks, Curry credits Jay Pennington and Delaney Martin, the directors of New Orleans Airlift, and NOMA curator of contemporary art Miranda Lash for inspiring and helping produce the project. The "Thalassa" portrait is of Naima Penniman, half of the performance art duo Alixa and Naima.

When: Installation has begun. The artwork will be officially introduced to the public with a Where Y’Art? reception Friday (June 10) from 5 to 10 and remains up through Sept. 25. Regular museum hours are Tuesdays through Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5, with extended hours until 9 on Fridays.